The Central Warehousing Corporation operates warehouses to provide storage and logistics support to the agricultural sector and primarily to address the storage requirements of Food Corporation of India. It operates under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution.
However, with the e-commerce boom in the country, the customer profile of the central public sector enterprise is undergoing change.
“This (client) profile is changing. Earlier FCI (Food Corporation of India) was the largest but now e-commerce companies are coming up like Amazon, Flipkart, bigbasket. Their preference is for CWC (Central Warehousing Corporation),” said Dr Anurag Tripathi, Regional Manager, Delhi Region, Central Warehousing Corporation to ET Infra.
According to a joint study by industry body ASSOCHAM and real estate services firm JLL, India’s warehouse inventory is expected to reach 500 million square feet by 2025 with increased demand from e-commerce, fast-moving consumer goods, auto and ancillaries, retail, electronics, and white goods among others.
In view of the increased demand, the enterprise is undertaking the development of 20 five-star (Grade A equivalent) warehouses. Grade A warehouses are state-of-the-art facilities with an average size of 160,000 square feet in India situated in prime locations.
“In the near future we are coming up with 20 warehouses (Grade A) by December. As far as investment is concerned it will cost around Rs 400 crores,” said Tripathi.
The Corporation recently completed the construction of a Grade A warehouse near Bengaluru International Airport covering an area of about 350,000 square feet, while a 300,000 square feet Grade A warehouse in Greater Noida is slated to be completed by March 2023. Altogether, it has about 122 five-star (Grade A) warehouses out of total 420 of such storage facilities.
Cold storage and PPP
The company is also constructing new cold storage facilities in Maharashtra and National Capital Region, said Tripathi.
In the past few years, the Corporation has opted for development of existing facilities through public-private partnerships.
“We have got a private investment in cold storage from Mech-Air, a Gujarat-based company,” said Tripathi adding that the investment has been under build-operate-transfer contract.
“We are giving the warehouse to them, and they are retrofitting the cold storage. This has been our first such engagement for cold storage facilities,” said Tripathi. It aims to develop an additional 150,000 to 200,000 pallet capacity for frozen and chilled products in two-three years. The Corporation’s revenue in 2020-21 (Apr-Mar) was Rs 2,168 crores, while profit after tax stood at Rs 438 crores.
